NEW HAVEN -- Raheem Nelson is the ultimate 21st-century artist: He doesn't need a studio, his work can be instantly uploaded to the Internet, he got a lot of training for his present medium on the Web, and his canvas is an iPad.

As he puts it, "Being a mobile artist, I can pretty much go where I want to work."

Where that has been mostly is New Haven and New York, and inspired by those two locales, he recently self-published in his second book "Through The Elm to The Big Apple" (available at lulu.com or about.me/raheemnelson). The 70 iPad-produced images of cityscapes, portraits, montages are colorful, reflective, iconic and fun, primarily because they're also a personal scrapbook of the artist, and because they show the growing utility of the still-nascent medium. Nelson's personal statements about each painting add a lot to understanding his thought process and the device (prints of works available at bluecanvas.com/raheemnelson+).

The School of Visual Arts grad, who majored in cartooning, has been drawing since he was in second grade. As a Wilbur Cross High School student, he studied at ACES-ECA, which he calls the place where "my formal art education began." Part of the New York portion of his work reflects sights he saw as a regular commuter into the Big Apple for art school -- a MetroNorth train, a Harlem skyline, Radio City Music Hall -- "important to me because it's where I graduated in 2007," says the New Havener.

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The book also has several essays by the artist, a mentor and friends from The Grove, the working space on Orange Street where Nelson spends a lot of time and where his work first got notice, eventually leading to an association with Artspace gallery.

A paraprofessional at Troup School, where he assists with first-grade reading, writing and language arts, Nelson says he sold his first piece of art as a seventh-grader, when his Sonic the Hedgehog-inspired comic books proved popular with friends.

"Then I kind of turned myself into a superhero loosely based on Spider-Man. I started doing that for a few years and then created a series of satires on politics, pop culture."

His ECA teachers encouraged him to scan his drawings and go over them with pens and color, as newspaper cartoonists do, and that and a Photoshop course led him down the path to digital art.

Needless to say, the introduction of the iPad in 2010 was a seminal moment for Nelson, though he says, "I had to re-learn how to draw. It was very strange at first. Just wrapping my head around using my fingers to draw, and I couldn't even rest my hand on the screen. You have to hold your hand over the screen," he says as he demonstrates with one of two favorite stylus instruments.

"Once I got the gist of drawing not on paper, but on glass, the iPad got out of the way and became just an artist's tool."

It takes a steady hand, and also involved a lot of research and trial and error into the various apps available which really serve as brushes to create the effects needed.

He has several favorites, some discovered through YouTube tutorials, some by recommendation, some by experimenting.

Sketchbook Pro, which he says was the hardest to master, provides the fine details in works. ArtRage he calls "more painterly. It looks like oils, and I'm able to take my art training and just go crazy."

His third go-to app is called Brushes, which is a great portrait tool, and the fourth is Procreate, which "I use mainly for comic- book work."

Nelson made sure he used all the apps in his works in the book, dividing up the effects equally to provide variety in his portfolio, which he's hoping will get some notice now that he's collected the work into one volume. A section in the book shows examples of each app effect.

Nelson felt he didn't have all of New York as well represented as he wanted, so he made several trips there specifically for source material, combing downtown, and the other boroughs for inspiration, snapping locales on his iPhone.

Nelson does freelance cartooning for The Orange Times, but his ultimate goal is to make a living with his digital art and further advance the techniques he's using on his iPad. He has shown his work at a New York show and recently at City-Wide Open Studios in October here.

"Everything is still emerging," he says of his work and the book. "I've made some income off it, but people are still unaware. I'm trying to get the word out on social media.

"My ultimate goal is to have a lot of residual income off prints and book solo shows in say, Harlem, SoHo, make money and create art," he says.

Nelson may be on his way to realizing those goals. His networking with fellow iPad artists has connected him with people like Jorge Colombo, whose iPhone work Nelson acknowledges as guidance in the early stages, and, more recently, a recommendation by lawyer Rich Schulman landed Nelson a gig with Sony Electronics doing holiday caricatures on their tablets in the Madison Avenue store.